Posted by Darth Mabel at 207.103.180.10 on October 23, 1999 at 14:21:43:
Anyone interested in drawing any meaning out of the recent protests against "Dogma" and the Brooklyn Museum of Art may be interested in the following from Lewis Hyde's "Trickster Makes This World":
"During the European middle ages an anuual Feast of Fools exposed the Catholic Church to the profanities usually kept beyond the walls of the churchyard. We get a clear sense of what went on from a fifteenth-century letter in which an apparently more decorous Parisian churchman complains about a Feast of Fools he'd seen in the provinces:
'In the very midst of divine service, masqueraders with grotesque faces, disguised as women, lions and mummers, performed their dances, sang indecent songs in the choir, ate their greasy food from a corner of the altar near the altar of the priest celebrating mass, got out their games of dice, burned a stinking incense made of old shoe leather, amd ran and hopped about all over the church.'
From other descriptions we know that excrement was sometimes burned instead of incense, and that the clergy themselves would sometimes ride in dung-filled carts through the town, eating sausages and tossing turds at the crowds."
It's sad to consider that, as a whole, we were apparently a lot better integrated five centuries ago.
Darth Mabel
a.k.a. King Of Twaddle